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Tag Archives: Gimp

I have a Nikon D5000, my LG Leon phone camera, and my Samsung Stratosphere II phone camera. Of all three of these devices, I love the camera on the Samsung Stratosphere II. It has multiple filters that can be used as you take the image, like the autumn setting used in this image. There is an adjustment for exposure value which allows you to adjust light and multiple other settings to play with as well.

I bought my LG Leon about 3 months ago, and still keep my Stratosphere II either in my glove box of the car or in my computer bag to have handy for test shots or just a quick camera to grab to snap a couple quick images. I know longer have phone service on it, but just keep it around as a spare camera.

Combine this camera with the power of Gimp photo editing software and you can come up with some incredibly beautiful photos. This photo was edited, using Gimp. I did a quick contrast adjustment, ran it through the oilify filter, then the canvas filter and done!

If you’ve never used Gimp, I highly recommend this open source alternative to Photoshop. http://www.gimp.org/

Here’s a quick and easy Youtube video that explains using Text To Path with Gimp.

To get curved text with Gimp to either wrap around an image or spruce up a graphic all you need to understand is how to Text To Path. This video explains it in a few easy steps. Once you figure out the basics, just use your imagination and the sky is the limit.

Today I want to show you how to create a watermark in Gimp to protect your copyrighted work. For the example I’ll use one of the tiles from my first graphic pack that I put up for sale. I needed a watermark to protect the sample graphics that can be seen here.

This is real simple to do and using Gimp we can achieve this in about 4 simple steps. NOTE: I tried to highlight all the buttons and tools that you will have to use. For the final steps I combined the opacity and rotate tool. If your new though, you can just mouse over the buttons to find out what they are. Just click on images to enlarge.

First download and load the trippy psychedelic fractal graphic above in Gimp. Once the tile is loaded you want to create a new layer and make sure that transparency is checked. If you like the graphic, click here for information on use.

Now select a font. I chose Sans Bold, I wanted to use something kind of chunky. And change your color to white and make the font size about 60px. Then click on the tile and type Sample. Note: If Gimp creates a font layer for you, some versions will, just delete the unused transparent layer.

Now click on the rotate tool. Then click on the Sample text and rotate till its going across the tile from corner to corner. You may want to use the move tool to center it. Just click on the move tool then click directly on the text and move it into position.

Finally, click on the opacity and bring it down to about 30 or whatever you think looks good. The goal is to make it not look overly annoying and not completely kill the design.

Finished product will look something like this.

That’s it, you’re done ! Click file, save, export as filename.jpg and your sample watermark is finished. You could also use a transparent svg file in whatever color you wanted as the overlay and then slide the opacity for the svg to get the same effect only in a design instead of text. I may do that in another tutorial down the road.

With all the web designing, social networking and trying to get my site up and functioning, I just haven’t had time to do any graphic design work. According to twitter, today is #NationalDrinkWineDay so I decided to crack open a bottle of wine when I got home from my day job, and play around with one of my favorite graphics programs, Gimp. My idea of a little rest and relaxation.

I wanted to do something a little different and came across this video on Youtube of a guy creating a old paper type of effect. The end result looks like an old pirate map. He uses the basic program, with the basic filters, the only thing you might need is a good set of grunge brushes, so if you don’t have those, go to your favorite search engine,search Gimp grunge brushes, and then watch the video. Enjoy.

In true Buffalo N.Y. fashion September arrives and the weather starts to change quickly. I woke up this morning to dark cloudy skies, rain, and already the leaves are starting to change from brilliant hues of green to the lovely autumn rusts of fall. It put me in the perfect mood to work on the blog, and make some seasonal changes. I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone and also post a simple Gimp tutorial on making a seamless background for your website, or blog.

The image I’m using for this tutorial can be found here. Image credits go to CarolinaJG at morguefile.com. If you’ve never used Morguefile.com before it’s a great place to find stock photography for your graphic design projects.

O.K. this should be pretty simple to follow. I’m hoping you have a basic idea of how Gimp works. In the future I’ll post some more in depth tutorials on the different tools and functions Gimp has to offer. For now I’m just going to post the basics of how to make a seamless tile using Gimp.

Step 1) Download the image from morgue file, or find one of your own. You’re going to turn the image into a seamless background, so the image should have some sort of pattern to it to begin with.

Step 2) Open the image in Gimp.

Step 3) Now in the toolbox that is usually placed on the left hand side of your screen, click on the rectangle select tool, click on fixed aspect ratio in the toolbox options and then make a perfect square on a section of the image. This can be achieved by clicking on the upper left hand corner of the image and then dragging it down to the lower right hand corner. Click on the center of the square and this will allow you to place the square on the section of the image you want.

Step 4) Now at the top of the screen click on the image drop down and in the drop down click on crop to selection.

Step 5) Now return to the top of the screen, click on the image drop down again, and this time select scale image and resize the image to 250 x 250 pixels.

Step 6) Now again at the top of the screen, click on filters, map, and select make seamless.

That’s it ! Your done. Save or Export the file as a .jpg image depending on what version of Gimp you’re using. You now have a seamless tile that you can use on a blog, website, or pattern fill in Gimp.

Some additional things I did to the image.

At the top of the screen I clicked on Colors and selected the color balance and adjusted the various color levels to bring out the reds, oranges and autumny colors of the leaves. I also changed around the brightness and contrast levels a bit.